Tuesday, February 24, 2004

My presentation on Winston Churchill at St. Olaf College yesterday turned into an unexpectedly exhilarating experience. Rocket Man trekked down to Northfield with his son Eric to lend moral support. I'm grateful for Rocket Man's generous remarks below on the event and Eric's perceptive comments on it afterwards. Please indulge these additional notes.

I was originally invited to submit an application to lead one of 40 seminars to be given at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum hosted this year by St. Olaf College. The students inviting me to submit an application were looking for the expression of a point of view that they thought would be in short supply among the anticipated orgy of hate-America pacifism; Jimmy Carter was to be the keynote speaker and the theme of this year's Forum was announced as "Striving for Peace: Roots of Change." The seminars were to address "grassroots activism."

It occurred to me that Winston Churchill's comprehensive efforts to awaken his countrymen to the dangers posed by Hitler and Nazism while he was out of high office during the 1930's might work as a subject. It would respond to the assigned theme and provide an alternate view of how peace should be promoted. In part, I intended to discuss how Churchill had opposed the English peace movements that had helped bring on World War II.

If there is one thing I have certainly noticed, it is that pacifists in general have no objection to enjoying the benefits of civilization but are unwilling to take the measures necessary to defend it from foreign and domestic barbarians. Such as the National Socialists, the Soviet Socialists, and the home grown socialists of the Democratic Party.

Contrary to their general delusion of virtue, pacifists are in effect, moral and political parasites upon civilized society.

The day I received e-mail notice that the proposed seminar had been turned down I called to ask the program co-chair why it had been rejcted. He told me that the topic involved events so long ago that it would not be of interest to the students attending the Forum. It wasn't until later that I learned that several of the accepted seminars involved historical subjects, although in those cases the seminars rigorously hewed to an anti-American or pacifist line.

Among the seminars and programs scheduled for the weekend were the following:

"Being Peace," a dance seminar: "Understanding peacefulness requires, in part, having experienced it oneself. This session will explore a variety of body-mind activities geared toward generating an inner state of peace. We will work with the movement principle of 'yield,'… which propel adults toward physical, mental emotional and spiritual change."

Which raises the question: Yield to what or whom?

"Making Music, Making Peace: Common Purposes and Shared Skills," a choral workshop: "Many of the skills essential to peace-making are also essential to music-making: listening, envisioning, mutual trust, repair, cooperation, collaboration. People who build their capacities as music-makers are also building their capacities for grassroots peace-making."

Don't be good. Just feel good.

By the way, the term for one who performs an act of collaboration is still a perjorative.

"Peace and Change through Public Art": This project "imagines a fictitious and yet believable National Historic Site sparking both controversy and healing. Amid a massacre site it tells the 500-year story from the perspective of native peoples and culminates with an apology…."

What? Apologize for carrying out the lethal force actions necessary to protect our families and our society from a band of savages that were behaving like a pack of predatory animals?

No fucking way. That is simply insane.

Peace in the real world is simply the absence of those -- such as the socialists -- who seek to deprive you, I, and our fellow citizens of our own Life, Liberty, and Property. Real peace can only be achieved by the physical isolation or outright elimination of those who seek to subjugate, plunder and murder us. This can only be done through the use of physical force.

In short, true peace can only be achieved only through the possession of superior firepower and the moral will to use it.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Meanwhile, the only Western leader who consistently speaks the truth about Iran is President George W. Bush, and the phony intellectuals of the West continue to call him a fool and a fascist. Meanwhile, his most likely Democrat opponent, Senator John Kerry, sends an e-mail to Tehran Times, Iran's official English-language newspaper, promising that relations between the United States and Iran would improve enormously if Kerry were to be elected next November.

Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.

"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."

Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" -- and mean it?

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Yesterday at Fallujah, Islamic terrorists "staged simultaneous morning assaults on three police stations, a civil defense base and the mayor's office". In the future many observations will be made of this battle: that the Al Qaeda timed their assaults to coincide with US unit rotations through Iraq; that they chose the moment when the baton is passing from US soldier to Iraqi policeman. But if the Iraqi nation goes on to live another hundred years, it will remember this:

Officers from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed a 10-minute drive away could hear the battle clearly. They offered help but the Hammad said it wasn't needed. The Americans did provide additional ammunition and weapons, including light machine guns. After the battle, soldiers at the civil defense base proudly displayed a light machine gun and a pair of rocket propelled grenade launchers they had captured from the attackers.

That when dying and bleeding, beset by the flower of terrorism, with pistol to set against automatic rifle and grenade, the Iraqi police did not ask for help from 82nd Airborne. They asked for ammunition.

And that ladies and gentlemen is how you build -- or in this case rebuild -- a nation.

Saturday, February 14, 2004

Now here we have some fellow who joined the Army "to get an education." That is the wrong reason. You join the Army to enforce the will of the people of the United States of America, by force, against their enemies. An Army exists for two reasons: first, to kill people, and second, to be so good at it that any threatening group will be intimidated to the point of inactivity. You do not join the Army to get anything. You join the Army to give of yourself, terminally if called for. I am not sure what this fellow means by "an education," but his meaning and mine obviously do not coincide.

Sunday, February 08, 2004

Thanks to intimidation by animal rights terrorists, Cambridge University has dropped plans to build a laboratory that would have conducted cutting-edge brain research on primates. According to The Times of London, animal-rights groups "had threatened to target the centre with violent protests ... and Cambridge decided that it could not afford the costs or danger to staff that this would involve."

The university had good reason to be afraid. At a nearby animal-testing company, Huntingdon Life Sciences, "protestors" have for several years attempted to shut down the company by threatening employees and associates, damaging their homes, firebombing their cars, even beating them severely.

Those who attack people and property for material gain are usually condemned by everyone as looters. (Except by Liberals.)

Why isn't a simular assault on persons and property for spiritual gain, such as feeling good about one's self, also grounds for comdemnation?

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking, conditions on the ground are partly cloudy, about 65 degrees, and the penis is evil.

-- Caption from a screen capture image from the Agony Booth review of ZARDOZ

One could have some fun doing ROCKY HORROR style callbacks with this film:

"The gun is good!"Yay Guns!

"The penis is evil!"Yay Penis!

Or something like that.

Some reviewers of this film have complained vigorously about the surfeit of flat-chested hippie chicks. Given the choice between entering a (*nudge-nudge*) mature relationship with an intelligent flat-chested hippie chick versus a surgically inflated overly made-up walking brain-death case such as Pamela Whatever Lee, I'd choose the former in a nanosecond.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

I am suspicious of anyone who writes a law containing over 230 points at which my doctor can be sent to jail for treating me--as Hillary's nationalized healthcare law did.

I am wary of the idea of hey-presto I'm your "Co-president."

I worry about the mentality that hires a staffer who says, regarding the presidential executive order, "Stroke of the pen. law of the land...pretty cool." (Paul Begala)

And, yes, this attitude toward the power of government is the SAME one that thinks that the clearly unconstitutional parts of the Patriot act are just fine, and McCain-Feingold doesn't limit free speech.

Stop. Them. All.

Meanwhile...here's a very flavorful overview of quotes about Hillary. The one from Maureen Dowd is a peach.